- From: Jon Hanna <jon@spinsol.com>
- Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 15:53:59 +0100
- To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 > I am grateful for your responses, perhaps part of the problem I'm > having is > that ie6 renders the title as a 'tooltip' whereas lynx renders the > alt. This leaves me a little non-plussed. The title is additional > information, however if the image is rendered, then the user first > needs the > alt tag.... > so I am still muddled. I think you are muddled because you are confusing some browsers (somewhat flawed) rendering of alt with it's purpose. NS2 (I think that was the first) introduced the practice of displaying the alt text for an image as a toolTip/Balloon-Help. This wasn't a terribly bad idea, for while alt should be equivalent to the image itself (as much as possible) the toolTip idea handled cases where poor authoring meant information could be gained from the alt text that could not be gained elsewhere. It was also of use to some partially-sighted users who wanted to see pictures, but who had difficulty with text-as-images (and in the case of some images that would include those of us with 20/20 or 20/20 corrected as well!). The problem with this is that the best text for a toolTip isn't necessarily, or even all that often, the best text to replace an image if only text is available for rendering (as it is on Lynx, screen-readers, and Braille devices). Since most designers (web-pages stopped being "authored" and started being "designed" around this period as well) think, intentionally or not, primarily about users of graphical browsers, they started thinking of alt as the toolTip text, not as ALTernative text. Others didn't like the toolTips (and they are annoying when you don't need them) and would deliberately leave out alt text. Since there is a place for toolTips, or other means to elaborate on possibly confusing objects, as well as for textual alternatives for images the title attribute was created. The purpose of the title attribute is to provide additional information, whereas alt provides the same information in a different way. The obvious way to render this on graphical browsers working in windowed environments is as a toolTip, this is recommended by the W3C (but not mandated IIRC) and IE4+ does this, although if no toolTip is specified it will use the alt-text for reasons of backwards-compatibility. > Is ignoring the title attribute maybe simplest? No, title is very useful, but serves a completely different purpose to the alt text. Consider the following: <a href="/"><img src="logo.gif" alt="Company Name" title="Go to home page" /></a> Assuming the logo is "Company Name" in a particular format then if you can't get the image you may well wish to display the name to have a branding effect, and to head the page with that name. Our logo is following the convention that top-left logos link to the home page, and the title provides a cue to this behaviour, on IE4+ this will be displayed as a toolTip for the image. The sighted user of IE4+ doesn't need to be told what the image says (if the image is reasonably large), but may gain from the *additional* information in the title. The text-based user gets the logo rendered as well as possible through text. They may also have some way of receiving the title information as well. (One thing about this though is that if there isn't another clear way to get to the home page on that page then the alt text probably should include that information so people don't get orphaned deep in the site). -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.3 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> iQA/AwUBO6oDBoFpv9f1Mr0YEQKnmQCePs4J1bRZTAk+duL395CyKv4pZpgAnjil J85k+IaioxIV5JDORLnTpt9C =WCg0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Received on Thursday, 20 September 2001 10:50:42 UTC